Eat the Rich. Do It Now.

They are parasites, gorging into financial obesity on the economic blood they suck from the workers who create the wealth the rich steal.

Bryce Covert at Think Progress:

The top ten percent of earners in the United States took home more than 50 percent of all income in 2012, the highest amount ever recorded since data was first collected in 1917, according to an updated report from economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty.
While the wealthiest took a big hit during the financial crisis, they’ve almost fully recovered.

Last year, income for the top 1 percent of earners “increased sharply,” the report notes, growing by nearly 20 percent, while the bottom 99 percent only saw money rise by 1 percent. “In sum,” the authors write, “top 1% incomes are close to full recovery while bottom 99% incomes have hardly started to recover.”

This follows a trend since the recovery officially began. From 2009 to 2012, income for the 1 percent grew by 31.4 percent, while everyone else only saw it grow by 0.4 percent. That means the 1 percent “captured 95% of the income gains in the first three years of the recovery,” they write.

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The U.S. suffers from particularly drastic income inequality. It is worse here than in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, the Ivory Coast, Pakistan, and Ethiopia.

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And U.S. policy is mostly to blame. The deregulation of Wall Street meant huge profits in the sector, attracting the 1 percent, whose incomes then took off from everyone else’s. Changes in the tax code for capital gains income, or money made through investment rather than salaries, is one of the largest factors. 

The filthy rich are not just clear and present danger to the economic survival of the nation, they are escaping justice for the crime of causing the 2008 economic meltdown that destroyed 10 million jobs and left millions of formerly middle-class families homeless, unemployed and impoverished.

Alan Pyke at Think Progress:

Five years ago this week, the investment bank Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. declared bankruptcy and triggered the financial collapse that brought us the Great Recession. Things have turned out quite well for former Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld and four other industry executives whose work contributed substantially to the cycle of subprime lending and financial swindling that caused the crisis. Fuld and his colleagues haven’t just avoided legal repercussions for the crisis. They’re also among the wealthiest people in the country. 

As part of a series commemorating the fifth anniversary of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) published a look at Fuld and executives from Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, and Bank of America on Tuesday. Here are three infuriating facts CPI unearthed about the masters of the financial universe.

1. Dick Fuld walked away with half a billion dollars and three homes.

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2. The former Bear Stearns CEO who walked away with over $300 million plays high-stakes bridge in retirement.

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3. Three bailed out CEOs whose “golden parachutes” were worth a combined $272 million are doing just fine.

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While these stories of huge personal success in the face of clear business failure are infuriating, they are far from exceptional. Fully one-third of the highest-paid financial industry CEOs of the past two decades have been fired, bailed out, or busted for fraud.

Meanwhile, 11.3 million Americans remain unemployed, with tens of millions more having dropped out of the workforce or struggling to survive on low-wage part-time service industry jobs. Those who do have work are earning less than they did prior to the crisis, and American workers as a whole have experienced a lost decade in wage growth despite boosting their productivity substantially. By contrast, the financial industry that caused the crisis has bounced back rapidly, with record profits and near-record bonuses for its executives.